Note footnotes — Front matter

[1] But British policy can hardly be called less contradictory. A year after the enactment of a Treaty which quite avowedly was framed for the purpose of checking the development of German trade, we find the unemployment crisis producing on the part of the New Statesman the following comment:—

‘It must be admitted, however, that the present wave of depression and unemployment is far more an international than a national problem. The abolition of “casual labour” and the adoption of a system of “industrial maintenance” would appreciably affect it. The international aspect of the question has always been important, but never so overwhelmingly important as it is to-day.

‘The present great depression, however, is not normal. It is due in the main to the breakdown of credit and the demoralisation of the “exchanges” throughout Europe. France cannot buy locomotives in England if she has to pay 60 francs to the pound sterling. Germany, with an exchange of 260 (instead of the pre-war 20) marks to the pound, can buy scarcely anything. Russia, for other reasons cannot buy at all. And even neutral countries like Sweden and Denmark, which made much money out of the war and whose “exchanges” are fairly normal, are financially almost hors de combat, owing presumably to the ruin of Germany. There appears to be no remedy for this position save the economic rehabilitation of Central Europe.

‘As long as German workmen are unable to exercise their full productive capacity, English workmen will be unemployed. That, at present, is the root of the problem. For the last two years we, as an industrial nation, have been cutting off our nose to spite our face. In so far as we ruin Germany we are ruining ourselves; and in so far as we refuse to trade with revolutionary Russia we are increasing the likelihood of violent upheavals in Great Britain. Sooner or later we shall have to scrap every Treaty that has been signed and begin again the creation of the New Europe on the basis of universal co-operation and mutual aid. Where we have demanded indemnities we must offer loans.

‘A system of international credit—founded necessarily on British credit—is as great a necessity for ourselves as it is for Central Europe. We must finance our customers or lose them and share their ruin, sinking deeper every month into the morass of doles and relief works. That is the main lesson of the present crisis.’—(Jan. 1st, 1921.)

[2] Out of a population of 45,000,000 our home-grown wheat suffices for only about 12,500,000, on the basis of the 1919-20 crop. Sir Henry Rew, Food Supplies in Peace and War, says: ‘On the basis of our present population ... we should still need to import 78 per cent. of our requirements.’ (p. 165). Before the War, according to the same authority, home produce supplied 48 per cent. in food value of the total consumption, but the table on which this figure is based does not include sugar, tea, coffee, or cocoa.

[3] The growing power of the food-producing area and its determination to be independent as far as possible of the industrial centre, is a fact too often neglected in considering the revolutionary movements of Europe. The war of the classes almost everywhere is crossed by another war, that between cities and country. The land-owning countryman, whether peasant or noble, tends to become conservative, clerical, anti-socialist (and anti-social) in his politics and outlook.

[4] ‘The Economic Consequences of the Peace,’ pp. 275-277.

[5] Manchester Guardian, Weekly Edition, February 6th., 1920.

[6] Daily News, June 28th., 1920.

[7] Sir William Goode, British Director of Relief, has said, (Times Dec. 6th., 1919):—

‘I have myself recently returned from Vienna. I feel as if I had spent ten days in the cell of a condemned murderer who has given up all hope of reprieve. I stayed at the best hotel, but I saw no milk and no eggs the whole time I was there. In the bitter, cold hall of the hotel, once the gayest rendezvous in Europe, the visitors huddled together in the gloom of one light where there used to be forty. They were more like shadows of the Embankment than representatives of the rich. Vienna’s world-famous Opera House is packed every afternoon. Why? Women and men go there in order to keep themselves warm, and because they have no work to do.’

He went on:—

‘First aid was to hasten peace. Political difficulties combined with decreased production, demoralisation of railway traffic, to say nothing of actual shortages of coal, food, and finance, had practically paralysed industrial and commercial activity. The bold liberation or creation of areas, without simultaneous steps to reorganise economic life, had so far proved to be a dangerous experiment. Professor Masaryk, the able President of Czecho-Slovakia, put the case in a nutshell when he said: “It is a question of the export of merchandise or of population.”’

[8] The figures for 1913 are:—

Imports.From British Possessions £192,000,000.

From Foreign Countries£577,000,000.

Exports.To British Possessions£195,000,000.

To Foreign Countries£330,000,000.

Re-exports. To British Possessions£14,000,000.

To Foreign Countries£96,000,000.

[9] The question is dealt with more fully in the last chapter of the ‘Addendum’ to this book. The chapter of ‘The Great Illusion’ dealing with the indemnity says: ‘The difficulty in the case of a large indemnity is not so much the payment by the vanquished as the receiving by the victor.’ (p. 76, 1910 Edition.) Mr Lloyd George (Jan. 28th., 1921) says: ‘The real difficulty is in securing payment outside the limits of Germany.... The only way Germany can pay is by exports—the difference between German imports and exports.... If she exports too much for the Allies it means the ruin of their industry.’

Thus the main problem of an indemnity is to secure wealth in exportable form which will not disorganise the victor’s trade. Yet so obscured does the plainest fact become in the murky atmosphere of war time that in many of the elaborate studies emanating from Westminster and Paris, as to ‘What Germany can pay’ this phase of the problem is not even touched upon. We get calculations as to Germany’s total wealth in railroads, public buildings, houses, as though these things could be picked up and transported to France or Belgium. We are told that the Allies should collect the revenues of the railroads; the Daily Mail wants us to ‘take’ the income of Herr Stinnes, all without a word as to the form in which this wealth is to leave Germany. Are we prepared to take the things made in the factories of Herr Stinnes or other Germans? If not, what do we propose that Germany shall give? Paper marks increased in quantity until they reach just the value of the paper they are printed on? Even to secure coal, we must, as we have seen, give in return food.

If the crux of the situation were really understood by the memorialists who want Germany’s pockets searched, their studies would be devoted not to showing what Germany might produce under favourable circumstances, which her past has shown to be very great indeed, but what degree of competitive German production Allied industrialists will themselves be ready to face.

“Big business” in England is already strongly averse to the payment of an indemnity, as any conversation in the City or with industrialists readily reveals. Yet it was the suggestion of what has actually taken place which excited the derision of critics a few years ago. Obviously the feasibility of an indemnity is much more a matter of our will than of Germany’s, for it depends on what shall be the size of Germany’s foreign trade. Clearly we can expand that if we want to. We might give her a preference!

[10] ‘What Happened to Europe.’

[11] Times, July 3rd., 1920.

[12] The proposal respecting Austria was a loan of 50 millions in instalments of five years.

[13] Mr Hoover seems to suggest that their repayment should never take place. To a meeting of Bankers he says:—

‘Even if we extend these credits and if upon Europe’s recovery we then attempt to exact the payment of these sums by import of commodities, we shall have introduced a competition with our own industries that cannot be turned back by any tariff wall.... I believe that we have to-day an equipment and a skill in production that yield us a surplus of commodities for export beyond any compensation we can usefully take by way of imported commodities.... Gold and remittances and services cannot cover this gulf in our trade balance.... To me there is only one remedy, and that is by the systematic permanent investment of our surplus production in reproductive works abroad. We thus reduce the return we must receive to a return of interest and profit.’

A writer in the New Republic (Dec. 29th., 1920.) who quotes this says pertinently enough:—

‘Mr Hoover disposes of the principal of our foreign loans. The debtors cannot return it and we cannot afford to receive it back. But the interest and profit which he says we may receive—that will have to be paid in commodities, as the principal would be if it were paid at all. What shall we do when the volume of foreign commodities received in payment of interest and profit becomes very large and our industries cry for protection?’

[14] The present writer declines to join in the condemnation of British miners for reduced output. In an ultimate sense (which is no part of the present discussion) the decline in effort of the miner is perhaps justified. But the facts are none the less striking as showing how great the difference of output can be. Figures given by Sir John Cadman, President of the Institute of Mining Engineers a short time ago (and quoted in the Fortnightly Review for Oct. 1920.), show that in 1916 the coal production per person employed in the United Kingdom was 263 tons, as against 731 tons in the United States. In 1918 the former amounted to 236 tons, and during 1919 it sank to 197½ tons. In 1913 the coal produced per man per day in this country was 0.98 tons, and in America it was 3.91 tons for bituminous coal and 2.19 tons for anthracite. In 1918 the British output figure was 0.80 tons, and the American 3.77 tons for bituminous coal and 2.27 for anthracite. Measured by their daily output, a single American miner does just as much work as do five Englishmen.

The inferiority in production is, of course, ‘to some considerable extent’ due to the fact that the most easily workable deposits in England are becoming exhausted, while the United States can most easily draw on their most prolific and most easily workable sites....

It is the fact that in our new and favourable coalfields, such as the South Yorkshire area, the men working under the most favourable modern conditions and in new mines where the face is near the shaft, do not obtain as much coal per man employed, as that got by the miners in the country generally under the conditions appertaining forty and fifty years ago.

[15] Mr J. M. Keynes, ‘The Economic Consequences of the Peace,’ p. 211, says:—‘It is an extraordinary fact that the fundamental economic problem of a Europe starving and disintegrating before their eyes, was the one question in which it was impossible to arouse the interest of the Four.’

[16] Incidentally we see nations not yet brought under capitalist organisation (e.g. the peasant nations of the Balkans) equally subject to the hostilities we are discussing.

Bertrand Russell writes (New Republic, September 15th., 1920):—‘No doubt commercial rivalry between England and Germany had a great deal to do with causing the war, but rivalry is a different thing from profit-seeking. Probably by combination, English and German capitalists could have made more than they did out of rivalry, but the rivalry was instinctive, and its economic form was accidental. The capitalists were in the grip of nationalist instinct as much as their proletarian ‘dupes.’ In both classes some have gained by the war, but the universal will to war was not produced by the hope of gain. It was produced by a different set of instincts, one which Marxian psychology fails to recognise adequately....

Men desire power, they desire satisfaction for their pride and their self-respect. They desire victory over their rivals so profoundly that they will invent a rivalry for the unconscious purpose of making a victory possible. All these motives cut across the pure economic motive in ways that are practically important.

There is need of a treatment of political motives by the methods of psycho-analysis. In politics, as in private life, men invent myths to rationalise their conduct. If a man thinks that the only reasonable motive in politics is economic self-advancement, he will persuade himself that the things he wishes to do will make him rich. When he wants to fight the Germans, he tells himself that their competition is ruining his trade. If, on the other hand, he is an ‘idealist,’ who holds that his politics should aim at the advancement of the human race, he will tell himself that the crimes of the Germans demand their humiliation. The Marxian sees through this latter camouflage, but not through the former.

[17] ‘If the Englishman sells goods in Turkey or Argentina, he is taking trade from the German, and if the German sells goods in either of these countries—or any other country, come to that—he is taking trade from the Englishman; and the well-being of every inhabitant of the great manufacturing towns, such as London, Paris, or Berlin, is bound up in the power of the capitalist to sell his wares; and the production of manufactured articles has outstripped the natural increase of demand by 67 per cent., therefore new markets must be found for these wares or the existing ones be “forced”; hence the rush for colonies and feverish trade competition between the great manufacturing countries. And the production of manufactured goods is still increasing, and the great cities must sell their wares or starve. Now we understand what trade rivalry really is. It resolves itself, in fact, into the struggle for bread.’ (A Rifleman: ‘Struggle for Bread.’ p. 54.)

[18] Mr J. M. Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, says: ‘I do not put the money value of the actual physical loss to Belgian property by destruction and loot above £150,000,000 as a maximum, and while I hesitate to put yet lower an estimate which differs so widely from those generally current, I shall be surprised if it proves possible to substantiate claims even to this amount.... While the French claims are immensely greater, here too, there has been excessive exaggeration, as responsible French statisticians have themselves pointed out. Not above 10 per cent. of the area of France was effectively occupied by the enemy, and not above 4 per cent. lay within the area of substantial devastation.... In short, it will be difficult to establish a bill exceeding £500,000,000 for physical and material damage in the occupied and devastated areas of Northern France.’ (pp. 114-117.)

[19] The Foundations of International Policy pp. xxiii-xxiv.

It is true, of course, that Governments were for their armies and navies and public departments considerable purchasers in the international market. But the general truth of the distinction here made is unaffected. The difference in degree, in this respect, between the pre-war and post-war state in so great as to make a difference of kind. The dominant motive for State action has been changed.

[20] See Addendum and also the authors’ War and the Workers. (National Labour Press). pp. 29-50.

[21] Note of May 22, 1919.

[22] Speech of September 5, 1919. From report in Philadelphia Public Ledger, Sept 6.

[23] In German East Africa we have a case in which practically the whole of the property in land was confiscated. The whole European population were evicted from the farms and plantations—many, of course, representing the labour of a lifetime—and deported. A visitor to the colony describes it as an empty shell, its productivity enormously reduced. In contradistinction, however, one welcomes General Smuts’s statement in the Union House of Assembly in regard to the Government’s intentions as to German property. He declared that the balance of nine millions in the hands of the Custodian after claims for damages had been recovered, would not be paid to the Reparations Commission, as this would practically mean confiscation. The Government would take the nine millions, plus interest, as a loan to South Africa for thirty years at four per cent. While under the Peace Treaty they had the right to confiscate all private property in South-West Africa, they did not intend to avail themselves of those rights. They would leave private property alone. As to the concessions, if the titles to these were proved, they would also be left untouched. The statement of the South African Government’s intentions, which are the most generous of any country in the world, was received with repeated cheers from all sections of the House.

[24] Since the above lines were written the following important announcement has appeared (according to The Times of October 26th., 1920.) in the Board of Trade Journal of October 21st.:—

‘H. M. Government have informed the German Government that they do not intend to exercise their rights under paragraph 18 of Annex II to Part VIII of the Treaty of Versailles, to seize the property of German nationals in this country in case of voluntary default by Germany. This applies to German property in the United Kingdom or under United Kingdom control, whether in the form of bank balances, or in that of goods in British bottoms, or of goods sent to this country for sale.

‘It has already been announced that German property, rights, and interests acquired since the publication of the General Licence permitting the resumption of trade with Germany (i.e. since July 12th., 1919), are not liable to retention under Art. 297 of the Peace Treaty, which gives the Allied and Associated Powers the right to liquidate all German property, rights, and interests within their territories at the date of the coming into force of the Treaty.’

This announcement has called forth strong protests from France and from some quarters in this country, to which the British Government has rejoined by a semi-official statement that the concession has been made solely on account of British commercial interests. The incident illustrates the difficulty of waiving even permissive powers under the Treaty, although the exercise of those powers would obviously injure British traders. Moreover, the Reparations (Recovery) Act, passed in March 1921, appears to be inconsistent with the above announcement.

[25] A point that seems to have been overlooked is the effect of this Treaty on the arrangements which may follow changes in the political status of, say, Egypt or India or Ireland. If some George Washington of the future were to apply the principles of the Treaty to British property, the effects might be far-reaching.

A Quarterly Review critic (April 1920) says of these clauses of the Treaty (particularly Article 297b.):—

‘We are justified in regarding this policy with the utmost apprehension, not only because of its injustice, but also because it is likely to form precedents of a most mischievous character in the future. If, it will be said, the Allied Governments ended their great war for justice and right by confiscating private property and ruining those unfortunate individuals who happened to have investments outside their own country, how can private wealth at home complain if a Labour Government proposes to confiscate private property in any business which it thinks suitable for “nationalisation”? Under another provision the Reparations Commission is actually allowed to demand the surrender of German properties and German enterprises in neutral countries. This will be found in Article 235, which “introduces a quite novel principle in the collection of indemnities.”’

[26] See quotations in Addendum.

[27] Cmd. 280 (1919), p. 15.

[28] The dilemma is not, of course, as absolute, as this query would suggest. What I am trying to make perfectly clear here is the kind of problem that faces us rather than the precise degree of its difficulty. My own view is that after much suffering especially to the children, and the reduction during a generation or two, perhaps, of the physical standard of the race, the German population will find a way round the sustenance difficulty. For one thing, France needs German coke quite as badly as Germany needs French ore, and this common need may be made the basis of a bargain. But though Germany may be able to surmount the difficulties created for her by her victors, it is those difficulties which will constitute her grievance, and will present precisely the kind, if not the degree, of injustice here indicated.

[29] One very commonly sees the statement that France had no adequate resources in iron ore before the War. This is an entire mistake, as the Report of the Commission appointed by the Minister of Munitions to visit Lorraine (issued July, 1919), points out (p. 11.):—‘Before the War the resources of Germany of iron ore were 3,600,000,000 tons and those of France 3,300,000,000.’ What gave Germany the advantage was the possession not of greater ore resources than France, but of coal suitable for furnace coke, and this superiority in coal will still remain even after the Treaty, although the paralysis of transport and other indispensable factors may render the superiority valueless. The report just quoted says:—‘It is true that Germany will want iron ore from Lorraine (in 1913 she took 14,000,000 tons from Briey and 18,500,000 tons from Lorraine), but she will not be so entirely dependent upon this one source of supply as the Lorraine works will be upon Germany for coke, unless some means are provided to enable Lorraine to obtain coke from elsewhere, or to produce her own needs from Saar coal and imported coking coal.’ The whole report seems to indicate that the mise en valeur of France’s new ‘property’ depends upon supplies of German coal—to say nothing of the needs of a German market and the markets depending on that market. As it is, the Lorraine steel works are producing nothing like their full output because of the inability of Germany to supply furnace coke, owing largely to the Westphalian labour troubles and transport disorganisation. Whether political passion will so far subside as to enable the two countries to come to a bargain in the matter of exchange of ore or basic pig-iron for furnace coke, remains to be seen. In any case one may say that the ore-fields of Lorraine will only be of value to France provided that much of their product is returned to Germany and used for the purpose of giving value to German coal.

[30] From the summary of a series of lectures on the Biology of Death, as reported in the Boston Herald of December 19th., 1920.

[31] A recent book on the subject, summing up the various recommendations made in France up to 1918 for increasing the birth-rate is La Natalité: ses Lois Economiques et Psychologiques, by Gaston Rageot.

The present writer remembers being present ten years before the War at a Conference at the Sorbonne on this subject. One of the lecturers summarised all the various plans that had been tried to increase the birth-rate. ‘They have all failed,’ he concluded, ‘and I doubt if anything remains to be done.’ And one of the savants present added: ‘Except to applaud.’

[32] Mr William Harbutt Dawson gives the figures as follows:—

‘The decline in the birth-rate was found to have become a settled factor in the population question.... The birth-rate for the whole Empire reached the maximum figure in 1876, when it stood at 41.0 per 1000 of the population.... Since 1876 the movement has been steadily downward, with the slightest possible break at the beginning of the ‘nineties.... Since 1900 the rate has decreased as follows:—

1900 35.6 per 1000.

190135.7 per “

190235.1 per “

190333.9 per “

190434.1 per 1000.

190533.0 per “

190633.1 per “

(The Evolution of Modern Germany. p. 309)

[33] Conversely it may be said that the economic position of the border States becomes impossible unless the greater States are orderly. In regard to Poland, Mr Keynes remarks: ‘Unless her great neighbours are prosperous and orderly, Poland is an economic impossibility, with no industry but Jew-baiting.’

Sir William Goode (the British Director of Relief) states that he found ‘everywhere never-ending vicious circles of political paradox and economic complication, with consequent paralysis of national life and industry. The new States of repartitioned Europe seem not only incapable of maintaining their own economic life, but also either unable or unwilling to help their neighbours.’ (Cmd. 521 (1920), p. 6.)

[34] From a manifesto signed by a large number of American intellectuals, business men, and Labour Leaders (‘League of Free Nations Association’) on the eve of President Wilson’s departure for Paris.

[35] Interview published by Pearson’s Magazine, March, 1915.

[36] Times, March 8, 1915. ‘Our honour and interest must have compelled us to join France and Russia even if Germany had scrupulously respected the rights of her small neighbours and had sought to hack her way through the Eastern fortresses. The German Chancellor has insisted more than once upon this truth. He has fancied apparently that he was making an argumentative point against us by establishing it. That, like so much more, only shows his complete misunderstanding of our attitude and our character.... We reverted to our historical policy of the Balance of Power.’

The Times maintains the same position five years later (July 31st, 1920): ‘It needed more than two years of actual warfare to render the British people wholly conscious that they were fighting not a quixotic fight for Belgium and France, but a desperate battle for their own existence.’

[37] How the War Came, p. 238.

[38] Lord Loreburn adds:—

‘But Sir Edward Grey in 1914 did not and could not offer similar Treaties to France and Germany because our relations with France and the conduct of Germany were such, that for us to join Germany in any event was unthinkable. And he did not proclaim our neutrality because our relations with France, as described in his own speech, were such that he could not in honour refuse to join France in the war. Therefore the example of 1870 could not be followed in 1914, and Belgium was not saved but destroyed.’

[39] See the Documents published by the Russian Government in November, 1917.

[40] It is not clear whether the undertaking to Russia was actually given. Lord R. Cecil in the House of Commons on July 24th, 1917, said: ‘It will be for this country to back up the French in what they desire. I will not go through all the others of our Allies—there are a good many of them—but the principle (to stand by our Allies) will be equally there in the case of all and particularly in the case of Serbia.’

[41] Since these lines were written, there has been a change of government and of policy in Italy. An agreement has been reached with Yugo-Slavia, which appears to satisfy the moderate elements in both countries.

[42] Lord Curzon (May 17th, 1920) wrote that he did not see how we could invoke the League to restrain Poland. The Poles, he added, must choose war or peace on their own responsibility. Mr Lloyd George (June 19th, 1920) declared that ‘the League of Nations could not intervene in Poland.’

[43] The War that will End War, p. 14.

[44] Ibid., p. 19.

[45] The Issue, p. 37-39.

[46] Land and Water, February 21st, 1918.

[47] Even as late as January 13th, 1920, Mr H. W. Wilson of the Daily Mail writes that if the disarmament of Germany is carried out ‘the real cause of swollen armaments in Europe will vanish.’

On May 18th, 1920, Field-Marshal Sir Henry Wilson (Morning Post, May 19th) declares himself thus:—

‘We were told that after this last war we were to have peace. We have not; there are something between twenty and thirty bloody wars going on at the present moment. We were told that the great war was to end war. It did not; it could not. We have a very difficult time ahead, whether on the sea, in the air, or on the land.’ He wanted them to take away the warning from a fellow soldier that their country and their Empire both wanted them to-day as much as ever they had, and if they were as proud of belonging to the British Empire as he was they would do their best, in whatever capacity they served, to qualify themselves for the times that were coming.

[48] July 31st, 1920.

[49] April 19th, 1919.

[50] A Reuter Despatch dated August 31st, 1920, says:—

‘Speaking to-day at Charleston (West Virginia) Mr Daniels, U. S. Naval Secretary, said: “We are building enormous docks and are constructing 18 dreadnoughts and battle cruisers, with a dozen other powerful ships which in effective fighting power will give our navy world primacy.”’

[51] We are once more back to the Carlylean ‘deep, patient ... virtuous ... Germany.’

[52] Sir Henry Wilson, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, in a memorandum dated December 1st, 1919, which appears in a Blue Book on ‘the Evacuation of North Russia, 1919,’ says:—‘There is one great lesson to be learned from the history of the campaign.... It is that once a military force is involved in operations on land it is almost impossible to limit the magnitude of its commitments.’

[53] And Russo-German co-operation is of course precisely what French policy must create. Says an American critic:—

‘France certainly carries a big stick, but she does not speak softly; she takes her own part, but she seems to fear neither God nor the revulsion of man. Yet she has reason to fear. Suppose she succeeds for a while in reducing Germany to servitude and Russia to a dictatorship of the Right, in securing her own dominion on the Continent as overlord by the petty States of Europe. What then? What can be the consequence of a common hostility of the Teutonic and Slavonic peoples, except in the end common action on their part to throw off an intolerable yoke? The nightmare of a militant Russo-German alliance becomes daily a more sinister prophecy, as France teaches the people of Europe that force alone is the solvent. France has only to convince all of Germany that the Treaty of Versailles will be enforced in all its rigour, which means occupation of the Ruhr and the loss of Silesia, to destroy the final resistance of those Germans who look to the West rather than to the East for salvation. Let it be known that the barrier of the Rhine is all bayonet and threat, and western-minded Germany must go down before the easterners, Communist or Junker. It will not matter greatly which.’ (New Republic, Sept. 15th, 1920).

[54] December 23rd, 1919.

[55] The Times of September 4th, 1920 reproduces an article from the Matin, on M. Millerand’s policy with regard to small States. M. Millerand’s aim was that economic aid should go hand in hand with French military protection. With this policy in view, a number of large businesses recently passed under French control, including the Skoda factory in Czecho-Slovakia, big works at Kattowitz in Upper Silesia, the firm of Huta-Bankowa in Poland, railway factories in Rumania, and certain river systems and ports in Yugo-Slavia. In return for assistance to Admiral Horthy, an agreement was signed whereby France obtained control of the Hungarian State Railways, of the Credit Bank, the Hungarian river system and the port of Buda-pest. Other reports state that France has secured 85 per cent. of the oil-fields of Poland, in return for her help at the time of the threat to Warsaw. As the majority of shares in the Polish Oil Company ‘Galicia,’ which have been in British hands until recently, have been bought up by a French Company, the ‘Franco-Polonaise,’ France now holds an important weapon of international policy.

[56] The present writer would like to enter a warning here that nothing in this chapter implies that we should disregard France’s very legitimate fears of a revived militarist Germany. The implication is that she is going the right way about to create the very dangers that terrify her. If this were the place to discuss alternative policies, I should certainly go on to urge that England—and America—should make it plain to France that they are prepared to pledge their power to her defence. More than that, both countries should offer to forgo the debts owing to them by France on condition of French adhesion to more workable European arrangements. The last thing to be desired is a rupture, or a mere change of rôles: France to become once more the ‘enemy’ and Germany once more the ‘Ally.’ That outcome would merely duplicate the weary story of the past.

[57] The Expansion of England, p. 202.

[58] The assumption marks even post-war rhetoric. M. Millerand’s message to the Senate and Chamber upon his election as President of the Republic says: ‘True to the Alliances for ever cemented by blood shed in common,’ France will strictly enforce the Treaty of Versailles, ‘a new charter of Europe and the World.’ (Times, Sept. 27th, 1920). The passage is typical of the moral fact dealt with in this chapter. M. Millerand knows, his hearers know, that the war Alliance ‘for ever cemented by blood shed in common,’ has already ceased to exist. But the admission of this patent fact would be fatal to the ‘blood’ heroics.

[59] Dr L. P. Jacks, Editor of The Hibbert Journal, tells us that before the War the English nation, regarded from the moral point of view, was a scene of ‘indescribable confusion; a moral chaos.’ But there has come to it ‘the peace of mind that comes to every man who, after tossing about among uncertainties, finds at last a mission, a cause to which he can devote himself.’ For this reason, he says, the War has actually made the English people happier than they were before: ‘brighter, more cheerful. The Englishman worries less about himself.... The tone and substance of conversation are better.... There is more health in our souls and perhaps in our bodies.’ And he tells how the War cured a friend of insomnia. (The Peacefulness of Being at War, New Republic, September 11, 1915).

[60] The facts of both the Russian and the Italian bargains are dealt with in more detail in Chap. III.

[61] Quoted by Mr T. L. Stoddard in an article on Italian Nationalism, in the Forum, Sept. 1915. One may hope that the outcome of the War has modified the tendencies in Italy of which he treats. But the quotations he makes from Italian Nationalist writers put Treitschke and Bernhardi in the shade. Here are some. Corradini says: ‘Italy must become once more the first nation in the world.’ Rocco: ‘It is said that all the other territories are occupied. But strong nations, or nations on the path of progress, conquer.... territories occupied by nations in decadence.’ Luigi Villari rejoices that the cobwebs of mean-spirited Pacifism have been swept away. Italians are beginning to feel, in whatever part of the world they may happen to be, something of the pride of Roman citizens.’ Scipione Sighele writes: ‘War must be loved for itself.... To say “War is the most horrible of evils,” to talk of war as “an unhappy necessity,” to declare that we should “never attack but always know how to defend ourselves,” to say these things is as dangerous as to make out-and-out Pacifist and anti-militarist speeches. It is creating for the future a conflict of duties: duties towards humanity, duties towards the Fatherland.’ Corradini explains the programme of the Nationalists: ‘All our efforts will tend towards making the Italians a warlike race. We will give it a new will; we will instil into it the appetite for power, the need of mighty hopes. We will create a religion—the religion of the Fatherland victorious over the other nations.’

I am indebted to Mr Stoddard for the translations; but they read quite ‘true to type.’

[62] It is true that the Labour Party, alone of all the parties, did take action, happily effective, against the Russian adventure—after it had gone on in intermittent form for two years. But the above paragraphs refer particularly to the period which immediately succeeded the War, and to a general temper which was unfortunately a fact despite Labour action.

[63] Mr Hartley Manners, the playwright, who produced during the War a book entitled Hate with a Will to Victory, writes thus:—

‘And in voicing our doctrine of Hate let us not forget that the German people were, and are still, solidly behind him (the Kaiser) in everything he does.’ ...

‘The German people are actively and passively with their Government to the last man and the last mark. No people receive their faith and their rules of conduct more fatuously from their rulers than do the German people. Fronting the world they stand as one with their beloved Kaiser. He who builds on a revolution in Germany as a possible ending of the war, knows not what he says. They will follow through any degradation of the body, through any torture of spirit, the tyrants they have been taught from infancy to regard as their Supreme Masters of body and soul.’ ...

And here is his picture of ‘the German’:—

... ‘a slave from birth, with no rights as a free man, owing allegiance to a militaristic Government to whom he looks for his very life; crushed by taxation to keep up the military machine; ill-nourished, ignorant, prone to crime in greater measure than the peasants of any other country—as the German statistics of crime show—a degraded peasant, a wretched future, and a loathesome past—these are the inheritances to which the German peasant is born. What type of nature can develop in such conditions? But one—the brute. And the four years’ commerce of this War has shown the German from prince to peasant as offspring of the one family—the brute family.’ ...

[64] The following—which appeared in The Times of April 17, 1915—is merely a type of at least thirty or forty similar reports published by the German Army Headquarters: ‘In yesterday’s clear weather the airmen were very active. Enemy airmen bombarded places behind our positions. Freiburg was again visited, and several civilians, the majority being children, were killed and wounded.’ A few days later the Paris Temps (April 22, 1915) reproduced the German accounts of French air-raids where bombs were dropped on Kandern, Loerrach, Mulheim, Habsheim, Wiesenthal, Tüblingen, Mannheim. These raids were carried out by squads of airmen, and the bombs were thrown particularly at railway stations and factories. Previous to this, British and French airmen had been particularly active in Belgium, dropping bombs on Zeebrugge, Bruges, Middlekirke, and other towns. One German official report tells how a bomb fell on to a loaded street car, killing many women and children. Another (dated September 7, 1915) contains the following: ‘In the course of an enemy aeroplane attack on Lichtervelde, north of Roulers in Flanders, seven Belgian inhabitants were killed and two injured.’ A despatch from Zürich, dated Sept. 24, 1915, says: ‘At yesterday’s meeting of the Stuttgart City Council, the Mayor and Councillors protested vigorously against the recent French raid upon an undefended city. Burgomaster Lautenschlager asserted that an enemy that attacked harmless civilians was fighting a lost cause.’

[65] March 27th, 1919.

[66] In Drinkwater’s play, Abraham Lincoln, the fire-eating wife of the war-profiteer, who had been violently abusing an old Quaker lady, is thus addressed by Lincoln:—

‘I don’t agree with her, but I honour her. She’s wrong, but she is noble. You’ve told me what you think. I don’t agree with you, and I’m ashamed of you and your like. You, who have sacrificed nothing babble about destroying the South while other people conquer it. I accepted this war with a sick heart, and I’ve a heart that’s near to breaking every day. I accepted it in the name of humanity, and just and merciful dealing, and the hope of love and charity on earth. And you come to me, talking of revenge and destruction, and malice, and enduring hate. These gentle people are mistaken, but they are mistaken cleanly, and in a great name. It is you that dishonour the cause for which we stand—it is you who would make it a mean and little thing....’

[67] The official record of the Meeting of the Council of Ten on January 16, 1919, as furnished to the Foreign Relations Committee of the American Senate, reports Mr Lloyd George as saying:—

‘The mere idea of crushing Bolshevism by military force is pure madness....

‘The Russian blockade would be a “death cordon,” condemning women and children to starvation, a policy which, as humane people, those present could not consider.’

[68] While attempting in this chapter to reveal the essential difference of the two methods open to us, it is hardly necessary to say that in the complexities and cross-currents of human society practical policy can rarely be guided by a single absolute principle. Reference has been made to the putting of the pooled force of the nations behind a principle or law as the alternative of each attempting to use his own for enforcing his own view. The writer does not suppose for an instant that it is possible immediately to draw up a complete Federal Code of Law for Europe, to create a well-defined European constitution and then raise a European army to defend it, or body of police to enforce it. He is probably the last person in the world likely to believe the political ideas of the European capable of such an agile adaptation.

[69] Delivered at Portland, Maine, on March 28th, 1918; reported in New York Times, March 29th.

[70] Bertrand Russell: Principles of Social Reconstruction.

Mr. Trotter in Instincts of the Herd in War and Peace, says:—

‘We see one instinct producing manifestations directly hostile to each other—prompting to ever-advancing developments of altruism while it necessarily leads to any new product of advance being attacked. It shows, moreover ... that a gregarious species rapidly developing a complex society can be saved from inextricable confusion only by the appearance of reason and the application of it to life. (p. 46.)

... ‘The conscious direction of man’s destiny is plainly indicated by Nature as the only mechanism by which the social life of so complex an animal can be guaranteed against disaster and brought to yield its full possibilities, (p. 162.)

... ‘Such a directing intelligence or group of intelligences would take into account before all things the biological character of man.... It would discover when natural inclinations in man must be indulged, and would make them respectable, what inclinations in him must be controlled for the advantage of the species, and make them insignificant.’ (p. 162-3.)

[71] The opening sentence of a five volume History of the Peace Conference of Paris, edited by H. W. V. Temperley, and published under the auspices of the Institute of International Affairs, is as follows:—

‘The war was a conflict between the principles of freedom and of autocracy, between the principles of moral influence and of material force, of government by consent and of government by compulsion.’

[72] Foremost as examples stand out the claims of German Austria to federate with Germany; the German population of the Southern Tyrol with Austria; the Bohemian Germans with Austria; the Transylvanian Magyars with Hungary; the Bulgarians of Macedonia, the Bulgarians of the Dobrudja, and the Bulgarians of Western Thrace with Bulgaria; the Serbs of the Serbian Banat with Yugo-Slavia; the Lithuanians and Ukrainians for freedom from Polish dominion.

[73] We know now (see the interview with M. Paderewski in the New York World) that we compelled Poland to remain at war when she wanted to make peace. It has never been fully explained why the Prinkipo peace policy urged by Mr Lloyd George as early as December 1918 was defeated, and why instead we furnished munitions, tanks, aeroplanes, poison gas, military missions and subsidies in turn to Koltchak, Denikin, Yudenitch, Wrangel, and Poland. We prolonged the blockade—which in the early phases forbade Germany that was starving to catch fish in the Baltic, and stopped medicine and hospital supplies to the Russians—for fear, apparently, of the very thing which might have helped to save Europe, the economic co-operation of Russia and Central Europe.

[74] ‘We have no quarrel with the German people. We have no feeling towards them but one of sympathy and friendship. It was not upon their impulse that their government acted in entering this war.’ ... ‘We are glad ... to fight thus for the ultimate peace of the world, and for the liberation of its peoples, the German peoples included: for the rights of nations great and small ... to choose their way of life.’ (President Wilson, Address to Congress, April 2nd, 1917).

[75] The Economic Consequences of the Peace, p. 211.

[76] See quotations from Sir A. Conan Doyle, later in this Chapter.

[77] See, e.g., the facts as to the repression of Socialism in America, Chapter V.

[78] The Atlantic Monthly, November 1920.

[79] Realities of War, pp. 426-7, 441.

[80] Is it necessary to say that the present writer does not accept it?

[81] The argument is not invalidated in the least by sporadic instances of liberal activity here—an isolated article or two. For iteration is the essence of propaganda as an opinion forming factor.

[82] In an article in the North American Review, just before America’s entrance into the War, I attempted to indicate the danger by making one character in an imaginary symposium say: ‘One talks of “Wilson’s programme,” “Wilson’s policy.” There will be only one programme and one policy possible as soon as the first American soldier sets foot on European soil: Victory. Bottomley and Maxse will be milk and water to what we shall see America producing. We shall have a settlement so monstrous that Germany will offer any price to Russia and Japan for their future help.... America’s part in the War will absorb about all the attention and interest that busy people can give to public affairs. They will forget about these international arrangements concerning the sea, the League of Peace—the things for which the country entered the War. In fact if Wilson so much as tries to remind them of the objects of the War he will be accused of pro-Germanism, and you will have their ginger Press demanding that the “old gang” be “combed out.”’

[83] ‘If we take the extremist possibility, and suppose a revolution in Germany or in South Germany, and the replacement of the Hohenzollerns in all or part of Germany by a Republic, then I am convinced that for republican Germany there would be not simply forgiveness, but a warm welcome back to the comity of nations. The French, British, Belgians, and Italians, and every civilised force in Russia would tumble over one another in their eager greeting of this return to sanity.’ (What is coming? p. 198).

[84] See the memoranda published in The Secrets of Crewe House.

[85] Mr Keynes is not alone in declaring that the Treaty makes of our armistice engagements a ‘scrap of paper.’ The Round Table, in an article which aims at justifying the Treaty as a whole, says: ‘Opinions may differ as to the actual letter of the engagements which we made at the Armistice, but the spirit of them is undoubtedly strained in some of the detailed provisions of the peace. There is some honest ground for the feeling manifested in Germany that the terms on which she laid down her arms have not been observed in all respects.’

A very unwilling witness to our obligations is Mr Leo Maxse, who writes (National Review, February, 1921):—

‘Thanks to the American revelations we are in a better position to appreciate the trickery and treachery of the pre-Armistice negotiations, as well as the hideous imposture of the Paris Peace Conference, which, we now learn for the first time, was governed by the self-denying ordinance of the previous November, when, unbeknown to the countries betrayed, the Fourteen Points had been inextricably woven into the Armistice. Thus was John Bull effectively ‘dished’ of every farthing of his war costs.’

As a fact, of course, the self-denying ordinance was not ‘unbeknown to the countries betrayed.’ The Fourteen Points commitment was quite open; the European Allies could have repudiated them, as, on one point, Britain did.

[86] A quite considerable school, who presumably intend to be taken seriously, would have us believe that the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, the English Trade Union Movement are all the work of a small secret Jewish Club or Junta—their work, that is, in the sense that but for them the Revolutions or Revolutionary movements would not have taken place. These arguments are usually brought by ‘intense nationalists’ who also believe that sentiments like nationalism are so deeply rooted that mere ideas or theories can never alter them.

[87] An American playwright has indicated amusingly with what ingenuity we can create a ‘collectivity.’ One of the characters in the play applies for a chauffeur’s job. A few questions reveal the fact that he does not know anything about it. ‘Why does he want to be a chauffeur?’ ‘Well, I’ll tell you, boss. Last year I got knocked down by an automobile and badly hurt. And I made up my mind that when I came out of the hospital I’d get a bit of my own back. Get even by knocking over a few guys, see?’ A policy of ‘reprisals,’ in fact.

[88] December 26th, 1917.

[89] A thing which happens about once a week in the United States.

[90] October 16th, 1917.

[91] The amazing rapidity with which we can change sides and causes, and the enemy become the Ally, and the Ally the enemy, in the course of a few weeks, approaches the burlesque.

At the head of the Polish armies is Marshal Pilsudski, who fought under Austro-German command, against Russia. His ally is the Ukrainian adventurer, General Petlura, who first made a separate peace at Brest-Litovsk, and contracted there to let the German armies into the Ukraine, and to deliver up to them its stores of grain. These in May 1920 were the friends of the Allies. The Polish Finance Minister at the time we were aiding Poland was Baron Bilinski, a gentleman who filled the same post in the Austrian Cabinet which let loose the world war, insisted hotly on the ultimatum to Serbia, helped to ruin the finances of the Hapsburg dominions by war, and then after the collapse repeated the same operation in Poland. On the other side the command has passed, it is said, to the dashing General Brusiloff, who again and again saved the Eastern front from Austrian and German offensives. He is now the ‘enemy’ and his opponents our ‘Allies.’ They are fighting to tear the Ukraine, which means all South Russia, away from the Russian State. The preceding year we spent millions to achieve the opposite result. The French sent their troops to Odessa, and we gave our tanks to Denikin, in order to enable him to recover this region for Imperial Russia.

[92] The Russian case is less evident. But only the moral inertia following on a long war could have made our Russian record possible.

[93] He complained that I had ‘publicly reproved him’ for supporting severity in warfare. He was mistaken. As he really did believe in the effectiveness of terrorism, he did a very real service by standing publicly for his conviction.

[94] Here is what the Times of December 10th, 1870, has to say about France and Germany respectively, and on the Alsace-Lorraine question:—

‘We must say with all frankness that France has never shown herself so senseless, so pitiful, so worthy of contempt and reprobation, as at the present moment, when she obstinately declines to look facts in the face, and refuses to accept the misfortune her own conduct has brought upon her. A France broken up in utter anarchy, Ministers who have no recognised chief, who rise from the dust in their air balloons, and who carry with them for ballast shameful and manifest lies and proclamations of victories that exist only in their imagination, a Government which is sustained by lies and imposture, and chooses rather to continue and increase the waste of lives than to resign its own dictatorship and its wonderful Utopia of a republic; that is the spectacle which France presents to-day. It is hard to say whether any nation ever before burdened itself with such a load of shame. The quantity of lies which France officially and unofficially has been manufacturing for us in the full knowledge that they are lies, is something frightful and absolutely unprecedented. Perhaps it is not much after all in comparison with the immeasurable heaps of delusions and unconscious lies which have so long been in circulation among the French. Their men of genius who are recognised as such in all departments of literature are apparently of opinion that France outshines other nations in a superhuman wisdom, that she is the new Zion of the whole world, and that the literary productions of the French, for the last fifty years, however insipid, unhealthy, and often indeed devilish, contain a real gospel, rich in blessing for all the children of men.

We believe that Bismarck will take as much of Alsace-Lorraine, too, as he chooses, and that it will be the better for him, the better for us, the better for all the world but France, and the better in the long run for France herself. Through large and quiet measures, Count von Bismarck is aiming with eminent ability at a single object; the well-being of Germany and of the world, of the large-hearted, peace-loving, enlightened, and honest people of Germany growing into one nation; and if Germany becomes mistress of the Continent in place of France, which is light-hearted, ambitious, quarrelsome, and over-excitable, it will be the most momentous event of the present day, and all the world must hope that it will soon come about.’

[95] We realise without difficulty that no society could be formed by individuals each of whom had been taught to base his conduct on adages such as these: ‘Myself alone’; ‘myself before anybody else’; ‘my ego is sacred’; ‘myself over all’; ‘myself right or wrong.’ Yet those are the slogans of Patriotism the world over and are regarded as noble and inspiring, shouted with a moral and approving thrill.

[96] However mischievous some of the manifestations of Nationalism may prove, the worst possible method of dealing with it is by the forcible repression of any of its claims which can be granted with due regard to the general interest. To give Nationalism full play, as far as possible, is the best means of attenuating its worst features and preventing its worst developments. This, after all, is the line of conduct which we adopt to certain religious beliefs which we may regard as dangerous superstitions. Although the belief may have dangers, the social dangers involved in forcible repression would be greater still.

[97] The Great Illusion, p. 326

[98] ‘The Pacifists lie when they tell us that the danger of war is over.’ General Leonard Wood.

[99] The Science of Power, p. 14.

[100] Ibid, p. 144.

[101] See quotations, Part I, Chapters I and III.

[102] The validity of this assumption still holds even though we take the view that the defence of war as an inevitable struggle for bread is merely a rationalisation (using that word in the technical sense of the psychologists) of impulse or instinct, merely, that is, an attempt to find a ‘reason’ for conduct the real explanation of which is the subconscious promptings of pugnacities or hostilities, the craving of our nature for certain kinds of action. If we could not justify our behaviour in terms of self-preservation, it would stand so plainly condemned ethically and socially that discipline of instinct—as in the case of sex instinct—would obviously be called for and enforced. In either case, the road to better behaviour is by a clearer revelation of the social mischief of the predominant policy.

[103] Rear-Admiral A. T. Mahan: Force in International Relations.

[104] The Interest of America in International Conditions, by Rear-Admiral A. T. Mahan, pp. 47-87.

[105] Government and the War, p. 62.

[106] State Morality and a League of Nations, pp 83-85.

[107] North American Review, March 1912.

[108] Admiral Mahan himself makes precisely this appeal:—

‘That extension of national authority over alien communities, which is the dominant note in the world politics of to-day, dignifies and enlarges each State and each citizen that enters its fold.... Sentiment, imagination, aspiration, the satisfaction of the rational and moral faculties in some object better than bread alone, all must find a part in a worthy motive. Like individuals, nations and empires have souls as well as bodies. Great and beneficent achievement ministers to worthier contentment than the filling of the pocket.’

[109] It is not necessary to enter exhaustively into the difficult problem of ‘natural right.’ It suffices for the purpose of this argument that the claim of others to life will certainly be made and that we can only refuse it at a cost which diminishes our own chances of survival.

[110] See Mr Churchill’s declaration, quoted Part I Chapter V.

[111] Mr J. L. Garvin, who was among those who bitterly criticised this thesis on account of its ‘sordidness,’ now writes: ‘Armageddon might become almost as frequent as General Elections if belligerency were not restrained by sheer dread of the consequences in an age of economic interdependence when even victory has ceased to pay.’

(Quoted in Westminster Gazette, Jan. 24, 1921.)

[112] The introductory synopsis reads:—

What are the fundamental motives that explain the present rivalry of armaments in Europe, notably the Anglo-German? Each nation pleads the need for defence; but this implies that some one is likely to attack, and has therefore a presumed interest in so doing. What are the motives which each State thus fears its neighbours may obey?

They are based on the universal assumption that a nation, in order to find outlets for expanding population and increasing industry, or simply to ensure the best conditions possible for its people, is necessarily pushed to territorial expansion and the exercise of political force against others (German naval competition is assumed to be the expression of the growing need of an expanding population for a larger place in the world, a need which will find a realisation in the conquest of English Colonies or trade, unless these were defended); it is assumed, therefore, that a nation’s relative prosperity is broadly determined by its political power; that nations being competing units, advantage, in the last resort, goes to the possessor of preponderant military force, the weaker going to the wall, as in the other forms of the struggle for life.

The author challenges this whole doctrine.

[113] See chapters The Psychological Case for Peace, Unchanging Human Nature, and Is the Political Reformation Possible?

‘Not the facts, but men’s opinions about the facts, is what matters. Men’s conduct is determined, not necessarily by the right conclusion from facts, but the conclusion they believe to be right.’

In another pre-war book of the present writer (The Foundations of International Polity) the same view is developed, particularly in the passage which has been reproduced in Chapter VI of this book, ‘The Alternative Risks of Status and Contract.’

[114] The cessation of religious war indicates the greatest outstanding fact in the history of civilised mankind during the last thousand years, which is this: that all civilised Governments have abandoned their claim to dictate the belief of their subjects. For very long that was a right tenaciously held, and it was held on grounds for which there is an immense deal to be said. It was held that as belief is an integral part of conduct, that as conduct springs from belief, and the purpose of the State is to ensure such conduct as will enable us to go about our business in safety, it was obviously the duty of the State to protect those beliefs, the abandonment of which seemed to undermine the foundations of conduct. I do not believe that this case has ever been completely answered.... Men of profound thought and profound learning to-day defend it, and personally I have found it very difficult to make a clear and simple case for the defence of the principle on which every civilised Government in the world is to-day founded. How do you account for this—that a principle which I do not believe one man in a million could defend from all objections has become the dominating rule of civilised government throughout the world?

‘Well, that once universal policy has been abandoned, not because every argument, or even perhaps most of the arguments, which led to it, have been answered, but because the fundamental one has. The conception on which it rested has been shown to be, not in every detail, but in the essentials at least, an illusion, a misconception.

‘The world of religious wars and of the Inquisition was a world which had a quite definite conception of the relation of authority to religious belief and to truth—as that authority was the source of truth; that truth could be, and should be, protected by force; that Catholics who did not resent an insult offered to their faith (like the failure of a Huguenot to salute a passing religious procession) were renegade.

‘Now, what broke down this conception was a growing realisation that authority, force, was irrelevant to the issues of truth (a party of heretics triumphed by virtue of some physical accident, as that they occupied a mountain region); that it was ineffective, and that the essence of truth was something outside the scope of physical conflict. As the realisation of this grew, the conflicts declined.’—Foundations of International Polity, p. 214.

[115] An attempt is made, in The Great Illusion, to sketch the process which lies behind the progressive substitution of bargain for coercion (The Economic Interpretation of the History of Development ‘From Status to Contract’) on pages 187-192, and further developed in a chapter ‘the Diminishing Factor of Physical Force’ (p. 257).

[116] ‘When we learn that London, instead of using its police for the running in of burglars and “drunks,” is using them to lead an attack on Birmingham for the purpose of capturing that city as part of a policy of “municipal expansion,” or “Civic Imperialism,” or “Pan-Londonism,” or what not; or is using its force to repel an attack by the Birmingham police acting as the result of a similar policy on the part of the Birmingham patriots—when that happens you can safely approximate a police force to a European army. But until it does, it is quite evident that the two—the army and the police force—have in reality diametrically opposed roles. The police exist as an instrument of social co-operation; the armies as the natural outcome of the quaint illusion that though one city could never enrich itself by “capturing” or “subjugating” another, in some wonderful (and unexplained) way one country can enrich itself by capturing or subjugating another....

‘France has benefited by the conquest of Algeria, England by that of India, because in each case the arms were employed not, properly speaking, for conquest, but for police purposes, for the establishment and maintenance of order; and, so far as they filled that role, their role was a useful one....

‘Germany has no need to maintain order in England, nor England in Germany, and the latent struggle, therefore, between these two countries is futile....

‘It is one of the humours of the whole Anglo-German conflict that so much has the British public been concerned with the myths and bogeys of the matter, that it seems calmly to have ignored the realities. While even the wildest Pan-German does not cast his eyes in the direction of Canada, he does cast them in the direction of Asia Minor; and the political activities of Germany may centre on that area for precisely the reasons which result from the distinction between policing and conquest which I have drawn. German industry is coming to have a dominating situation in the Near East, and as those interests—her markets and investments—increase, the necessity for better order in, and the better organisation of, such territories, increases in corresponding degree. Germany may need to police Asia Minor.’ (The Great Illusion, pp. 131-2-3.)

[117] ‘If a great country benefits every time it annexes a province, and her people are the richer for the widened territory, the small nations ought to be immeasurably poorer than the great; instead of which, by every test which you like to apply—public credit, amounts in savings banks, standard of living, social progress, general well-being—citizens of small States are, other things being equal, as well off as, or better off than, the citizens of great. The citizens of countries like Holland, Belgium, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, are, by every possible test, just as well off as the citizens of countries like Germany, Austria, or Russia. These are the facts which are so much more potent than any theory. If it were true that a country benefited by the acquisition of territory, and widened territory meant general well-being, why do the facts so eternally deny it? There is something wrong with the theory.’ (The Great Illusion, p. 44).

[118] See Chapters of The Great Illusion, The State as a Person, and A False Analogy and its Consequences.

[119] In the synopsis of the book the point is put thus: ‘If credit and commercial contract are tampered with an attempt at confiscation, the credit-dependent wealth is undermined, and its collapse involves that of the conqueror; so that if conquest is not to be self-injurious it must respect the enemy’s property, in which case it becomes economically futile.’

[120] ‘We need markets. What is a market? “A place where things are sold.” That is only half the truth. It is a place where things are bought and sold, and one operation is impossible without the other, and the notion that one nation can sell for ever and never buy is simply the theory of perpetual motion applied to economics; and international trade can no more be based upon perpetual motion than can engineering. As between economically highly-organised nations a customer must also be a competitor, a fact which bayonets cannot alter. To the extent to which they destroy him as a competitor, they destroy him, speaking generally and largely, as a customer.... This is the paradox, the futility of conquest—the great illusion which the history of our own empire so well illustrates. We “own” our empire by allowing its component parts to develop themselves in their own way, and in view of their own ends, and all the empires which have pursued any other policy have only ended by impoverishing their own populations and falling to pieces.’ (p. 75).

[121] See Part I, Chapter II.

[122] Government and the War, pp. 52-59.

[123] The Political Theory of Mr Norman Angell, by Professor A. D. Lindsay, The Political Quarterly, December 1914.

[124] In order that the reader may grasp more clearly Mr Lindsay’s point, here are some longer passages in which he elaborates it:—

‘If all nations really recognised the truth of Mr Angell’s arguments, that they all had common interests which war destroyed, and that therefore war was an evil for victors as well as for vanquished, the European situation would be less dangerous, but were every one in the world as wisely concerned with their own interests as Mr Angell would have men to be, if they were nevertheless bound by no political ties, the situation would be infinitely more dangerous than it is. For unchecked competition, as Hobbes showed long ago, leads straight to war however rational men are. The only escape from its dangers is by submitting it to some political control. And for that reason the growth of economic relations at the expense of political, which Mr Angell heralds with such enthusiasm, is the greatest peril of modern times.

‘If men are to avoid the danger that, in competing with one another in the small but immediate matters where their interests diverge, they may overreach themselves and bring about their mutual ruin, two things are essential, one moral or emotional, the other practical. It is not enough that men should recognise that what they do affects other men, and vice versa. They must care for how their actions affect other men, not only for how they may react on themselves. They must, that is, love their neighbours. They must further agree with one another in caring for certain ways of action quite irrespective of how such ways of action affect their personal interests. They must, that is, be not only economic but moral men. Secondly, recognising that the range of their personal sympathies with other men is more restricted than their interdependence, and that in the excitement of competition all else is apt to be neglected, they must depute certain persons to stand out of the competitive struggle and look after just those vital common interests and greater issues which the contending parties are apt to neglect. These men will represent the common interests of all, their common ideals and their mutual sympathies; they will give to men’s concern for these common ends a focus which will enable them to resist the pull of divergent interests and round their actions will gather the authority which these common ends inspire....

’ ... Such propositions are of course elementary. It is, however, important to observe that economic relations are in this most distinguished from political relations, that men can enter into economic relations without having any real purpose in common. For the money which they gain by their co-operation may represent power to carry out the most diverse and conflicting purposes....

’ ... Politics implies mutual confidence and respect and a certain measure of agreement in ideals. The consequence is that co-operation for economic is infinitely easier than for political purposes and spreads much more rapidly. Hence it easily overruns any political boundaries, and by doing so has produced the modern situation which Mr Angell has described.’

[125] I have in mind, of course, the writings of Cole, Laski, Figgis, and Webb. In A Constitution for the Socialist Commonwealth of Great Britain, Mr Webb writes:—

‘Whilst metaphysical philosophers had been debating what was the nature of the State—by which they always meant the sovereign Political State—the sovereignty, and even the moral authority of the State itself, in the sense of the political government, were being silently and almost unwittingly undermined by the growth of new forms of Democracy.’ (p. xv.)

In Social Theory, Mr Cole, speaking of the necessary co-ordination of the new forms of association, writes:—

‘To entrust the State with the function of co-ordination would be to entrust it in many cases with the task of arbitrating between itself and some other functional association, say a church or a trade union.’ There must be a co-ordinating body, but it ‘must be not any single association, but a combination of associations, a federal body in which some or all of the various functional associations are linked together.’ (pp. 101 and 134.) A reviewer summarises Mr Cole as saying: ‘I do not want any single supreme authority. It is the sovereignty of the State that I object to, as fatal to liberty. For single sovereignty I substitute a federal union of functions, and I see the guarantee of personal freedom in the severalty which prevents any one of them from undue encroachments.’

[126] The British Treasury has issued statements showing that the French people at the end of last year were paying £2. 7s., and the British people £15. 3s. per head in direct taxation. The French tax is calculated at 3.5. per cent. on large incomes, whereas similar incomes in Great Britain would pay at least 25 per cent. This does not mean that the burden of taxes on the poor in France is small. Both the working and middle classes have been very hard hit by indirect taxes and by the rise in prices, which is greater in France than in England.

The point is that in France the taxation is mainly indirect, this falling most heavily upon the poor; while in England it is much more largely direct.

The French consumers are much more heavily taxed than the British, but the protective taxes of France bring in comparatively little revenue, while they raise the price of living and force the French Government and the French local authorities to spend larger and larger amounts on salaries and wages.

The Budget for the year 1920 is made the occasion for an illuminating review of France’s financial position by the reporter of the Finance Commission, M. Paul Doumar.

The expenditure due to the War until the present date amounts roughly to 233,000 million francs (equivalent, at the normal rate of exchange, to £9,320,000,000) whereof the sum of 43,000 million francs has been met out of revenue, leaving a deficit of 190 billions.

This huge sum has been borrowed in various ways—26 billions from the Bank of France, 35 billions from abroad, 46 billions in Treasury notes, and 72 billions in regular loans. The total public debt on July 1 is put at 233,729 millions, reckoning foreign loans on the basis of exchange at par.

M. Doumer declares that so long as this debt weighs on the State, the financial situation must remain precarious and its credit mediocre.

[127] January, 1921.

[128] An authorised interview published by the daily papers of January 28th, 1921.

M. Briand, the French Premier, in explaining what he and Mr Lloyd George arranged at Paris to the Chamber and Senate on February 3rd, remarked:—

‘We must not lose sight of the fact that in order to pay us Germany must every year create wealth abroad for herself by developing her exports and reducing her imports to strictly necessary things. She can only do that to the detriment of the commerce and industry of the Allies. That is a strange and regrettable consequence of facts. The placing of an annuity on her exports, payable in foreign values, will, however, correct as much as possible this paradoxical situation.’

[129] Version appearing in the Times of January 28th, 1921.

[130] The Manchester Guardian, Jan 31st, 1921.

[131] Mr John Foster Dulles, who was a member of the American delegation at the Peace Conference, has, in an article in The New Republic for March 30th, 1921, outlined the facts concerning the problem of payment more completely than I have yet seen it done. The facts he reveals constitute a complete and overwhelming vindication of the case as stated in the first edition of The Great Illusion.

[132] As the Lorraine ores are of a kind that demand much less than their own weight of coal for smelting, it is more economic to bring the coal to the ore than vice versa. It was for political and military reasons that the German State encouraged the placing of some of the great furnaces on the right instead of the left bank of the Rhine.

[133] It is worth while to recall here a passage from The Economic Consequences of the Peace, by Mr J. M. Keynes, quoted in Chapter I. of this book.

[134] There is one aspect of the possible success of France which is certainly worth consideration. France has now in her possession the greatest iron ore fields in Europe. Assume that she is so far successful in her policy of military coercion that she succeeds in securing vast quantities of coal and coke for nothing. French industry then secures a very marked advantage—and an artificial and ‘uneconomic’ one—over British industry, in the conversion of raw materials into finished products. The present export by France of coal which she gets for nothing to Dutch and other markets heretofore supplied by Britain might be followed by the ‘dumping’ of steel and iron products on terms which British industry could not meet. This, of course, is on the hypothesis of success in obtaining ‘coal for nothing,’ which the present writer regards as extremely unlikely for the reasons here given. But it should be noted that the failure of French effort in this matter will be from causes just as disastrous for British prosperity as French success would be.

[135] See Part I, Chapter I.

[136] English Review, January 1913.

Lord Roberts, in his ‘Message to the Nation,’ declared that Germany’s refusal to accept the world’s status quo was ‘as statesmanlike as it is unanswerable.’ He said further:—

‘How was this Empire of Britain founded? War founded this Empire—war and conquest! When we, therefore, masters by war of one-third of the habitable globe, when we propose to Germany to disarm, to curtail her navy or diminish her army, Germany naturally refuses; and pointing, not without justice, to the road by which England, sword in hand, has climbed to her unmatched eminence, declares openly, or in the veiled language of diplomacy, that by the same path, if by no other, Germany is determined also to ascend! Who amongst us, knowing the past of this nation, and the past of all nations and cities that have ever added the lustre of their name to human annals, can accuse Germany or regard the utterance of one of her greatest a year and a half ago, (or of General Bernhardi three months ago) with any feelings except those of respect?’ (pp. 8-9.)

[137] Lord Loreburn says: ‘The whole train of causes which brought about the tragedy of August 1914 would have been dissolved by a Russian revolution.... We could have come to terms with Germany as regards Asia Minor: Nor could the Alsace-Lorraine difficulty have produced trouble. No one will pretend that France would have been aggressive when deprived of Russian support considering that she was devoted to peace even when she had that support. Had the Russian revolution come, war would not have come.’ (How the War Came, p. 278.)

[138] Mr Walter Lippmann did tackle the problem in much the way I have in mind in The Stakes of Diplomacy. That book is critical of my own point of view. But if books like that had been directed at The Great Illusion, we might have made headway. As it is, of course, Mr Lippmann’s book has been useful in suggesting most that is good in the mandate system of the League of Nations.